Enter the Newcomer

The need for speed - Differences upon differences - Taking the giant leap

Hey - Nnamdi here!

I am sharing these 3 ideas for this week.

The need for speed

Oftentimes, when people move to a different society to chase a dream, money, or a better life, they think that assimilating into that new society and getting to that goal will be a simple process. They are unaware that they are taking a number of risks that are new, complex and hidden to them. And that the more novel the new society, the higher the risks.

Moving to a different country implies the need to quickly adapt to a new eco-social landscape. The problem is embedded in the “quickly”. Efforts to adapt quickly is analogous to drinking from a firehose. The "quickly" part poses a very big problem since a rapid rate of change in a short period of time is at odds with the way nature works. The need to adapt quickly implies speed and we know speed kills especially if you are driving with no map or wrong map while carrying old and new problems.

Societies are made up of three forces: nature, culture, and how the society is organized. It is due to one or more of these forces that people migrate from one place to another. Nature did not allow you to be there, man made ideas were in conflict with the person or group(cultural differences), the structures of the society were in conflict with the person or groups (especially in matters economical). Failure to spot how these forces operate in one's own society almost always means failure to spot in the adopted society which leads one to keep making certain classes of mistakes that are time and resource costly.

It can be a relief to change countries, particularly if you were lower middle class or below in early 90s Nigeria, but it also predisposes you to certain downsides of those forces in Chicago. Because of the magnitude and complexity of the problem, it was hard for me to promptly compute these differences. That is to say that it was highly difficult to make sense of our whole situation in Chicago although Mom got a higher paying job as a nurse, and Dad was relegated career-wise from civil engineer to taxi driver. It was still a good bet, a give and take scenario so that I and my five siblings had a better shot at the future with the highly coveted American dream. I still wonder what the new “breadwinner” order of things did to their relationship and how that reverberated to all six kids. As well, I wonder what the added burden of raising six kids in a foreign land without “village” assistance did to them. The ancients had weighed in on this issue and wisely summarized that it requires a village.

Hence the name "newcomer" can be described as a person who goes to a different country to look for opportunities. There is a slight problem. The newcomer is naive about the risks that are hidden along the path. 

It goes without saying that the newcomer lacks experience. Their new life isn't supported by the information they need, or if they have it, it's often incomplete and haphazardly told by other naive and underexposed newcomers, who not surprisingly lack experience and or wisdom about what it truly takes to adjust in their new society. As if not having the initial knowledge and being unprepared wasn't enough. Even when a newcomer does gain some useful knowledge about their new society, it often comes at the great expense of their time and wellbeing. The time has passed when it may be useful. This useful information is carried to their graves and not shared with their community, furthering the tragedy.

Differences upon differences

The newcomer's interaction with their new society is complicated by the differences and to what extent they stretch the newcomer - a strange natural setting, a foreign lifestyle, a different community and if high-paced vs. slow-paced, a hostile workplace, new relationships marked with all the goodies that come with being a member of the outgroup.

Being an immigrant from Africa is hard because once you land here, all your foundations are shifted simultaneously and to a large degree by these three forces. Physiological, mental, familial, and community shifts take place in layers and fractals. By taking these forces for granted, I committed the cardinal sin of a newcomer.

My thoughts turn to the past 25 years while I write these words in Mozambique, a very different country from Nigeria but much less of an adjustment for me. I am still trying to figure out what had been lost, what was actually gained; and what it takes to realign myself as a newcomer. After so many years in the United States, I remain one. The American passport is not very useful with this “newcomer in America problem”. There is nothing automatic about my American side, it is still strenuous and contrived. The passport is quite useful for me as a traveler in Africa and comes with some perks. 

It’s easy for children to adapt to a new culture. For an adult, learning new behavioral rules and norms is not a natural thing. It becomes a reengineering process. This tends to be very messy.

Survival does mean that the newcomer must change themselves and their new living conditions. Their new social life is typically driven by common personality quirks that differentiate insiders from outsiders. And callousness towards outsiders is the standard. Especially in situations where there is a lot on the line or at work, constant contact with vile attitudes is the rule. The irony is that the newcomer’s success is now tied to development of new behaviors, mannerisms, and accents within that setting. The newcomer needs to make “friends”. The society lays out a procrustean bed for the newcomer, a catch-22 situation of sorts, while asking the newcomer “How much of yourself do you need to decapitate to fit our version of success? “How far can we stretch you”?

Due to inertia, say the way that newcomers observe themselves to solve this “success problem”, and new societal pressures, newcomers will adopt habits that are not in their best interests just to fit in. The strong need to learn unfamiliar, unobvious new rules of behavior in order to be successful without cultural references, control, and belonging leads to more confusion and high stress.

The newcomer’s early years are filled with layers of anxiety. Isolated to a great degree. So you're going to this place and you're trying to connect and the feedback you get is that you are an alien, you are weird, you're an outsider. It's really tough to feel safe. You don't know how long that will last. As for the newcomer, we hope he or she has the inner strength to cope with being alone, highly stressed, and without the safety net of a cultural umbrella at home. Prepared to be in a place where he or she isn’t socially accepted just out of the box and has to figure out how to negotiate that acceptance(while factoring in the costs) needed for success, and how that works in the adopted society. And to understand that the newcomer gains by understanding the differences, not by servile imitation.

Further blurring perceptions of these geographically adaptive risks, are the reasons behind the move. Was the move to get a better education? Get a good job? Escape an oppressive African regime? Ethnic conflicts or civil wars? Famine, drought or other natural disasters? Today, I think that most of the moves from Africa to western societies center around escaping poverty. Economics tends to be the culprit here although they will say “I came to America to get an education”. That is more believable if they were the first influx of African immigrants in the early 60s, before the fallout of foundational and structural issues; and poor governance started seeping through African societies post independence.

The problem here is that newcomers fail to realize that the process of getting acclimated to a new society is a multidimensional problem that cannot be viewed solely through the “economics” lens. Newcomers tend to overemphasize their attention and efforts at solving the money problem first and only. At the cost of neglecting their overall well being. There are substantial changes in many aspects of immigrants’ lives, including language, social identity, norms, values and attitudes, cultural familiarity, new foods, new lifestyle, new definitions of almost everything already defined and have worked back home, for the most part.

In terms of some key decisions, understanding the reasons behind the move is crucial. Someone who moves temporarily, say for a year or so for studies, will have different priorities and decisions to make than someone who moves without thoughts of moving back.  Among those decisions is deciding what you want to keep and what you don't want to keep about yourself. How deeply do I immerse myself and go with the flow? And why? But the newcomer is facing the mammoth of new survival pressures and doesn’t have the luxury of time, knowledge and capacity to reflect upon this. 

The giant leap

The newcomer almost always takes the giant leap, as I call it, which is trying to solve the economic problem with unmeasurable and severe negative consequences to the body, mind, social, culture and family. It takes a while for this to be realized. It is the gradual accumulation of those hidden new risks in those vital areas of life (that have natural and effortless solutions built-in), which make us wholesome, which eventually come to the surface and outweigh the money. The risk is embedded in the neglect of the vital areas.

And that is because we do not realize that the more different the new society is relative to our native society, then the more we are prone to those unseen risks.

The newcomer doesn't examine specific contrasts between the new society and the newcomer's native society to improve odds of success. Say a low or middle income person from Aba in Tropical Africa who migrates to the city of Chicago, say to get an education, will find it difficult to adapt to the quick pace and high cost of the big cities(that offsets the higher income). In Aba, there is more sun during the day and yearly. In Chicago, the weather is colder, there is less sun during the day, and the seasons are shorter. In the long run, less sun for such a person affects his mood, leads to less energy expended and leads to weight gain. Sedentism leads to more negative thoughts, which may lead to depression. Moreso if the climates are conflicting or polar opposites - from tropics to freezing. The ecology conflicts with his evolutionary history. So his specific instincts and natural rhythms are in limbo. Your whole being is in a state of confusion. 

The newcomer doesn’t consider different things that will make them more vulnerable. Consider that diet, climate, and the contact between the body and non-native microorganisms, inevitably changes your health. By the simple fact of being a newcomer, your body is not familiar with the variety of microorganisms and foods in Chicago. 

Another major risk, often overlooked in the past, is also linked with the rapid changes in the immigrant’s physiology, in the microbiome(guts) especially in an urban setting such as Chicago, which increases immigrants’ populations' vulnerability to diseases.

Moving with the inertia, that is unawareness combined with letting yourself be randomly changed by the new circumstances, does have some serious implications. Going to a new society blindly with automatic high optimism for success is like going to the casino and automatically expecting to win.